which is fine and valid for most cases, but you might need something else. For example, you want to rename <a> to something meaningful, let's say "contract". XmlRootElement annotation has "name" property which is designed for these cases, so lets add it to our class A annotation (@XmlRootElement(name="contract") public class A { ... } ) and make that request again..

Looks better, <a> has changed to <contract> and we might be satisfied.. oh wait, what about <as>? It haven't changed! Firstly, <as> was just plural for <a> and it stayed same when XmlRootElements name property was specified.. oops. This was a bug in Jersey and we couldn't fix it without breaking backwards compatibility, so fix for this is enabled only when FEATURE_XMLROOTELEMENT_PROCESSING is enabled (set to true). Lets do that and see how output changes..

Ha, we are almost there. Or.. depends what you want, I guess most of users is satisfied and doesn't need to read further. But there is always someone who wants something "extra".. like specify wrapping element. That is needed for some cases (like B2B communication) and Jersey needs to be able to handle this usecase as well. Unfortunately its not as clean as other solutions. We need to implement our own MessageBodyWriter and for those not familiar with JAX-RS API - it basically allows you to specify how the output will be presented for which mediatype.

Your MessageBodyWriter needs to have @javax.ws.rs.ext.Provider annotation (or be added as provider to ResourceConfig) and implement MessageBodyWriter interface.. I create such class which is sufficient for basic cases, you might want to improve it by creating support for other charsets than UTF-8 or gathering Marshaller from other source that creating new instance.. but at least its a working startpoint..